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evaluation of Legge's overall scholarship would consequently demand expertise in a wide range of Chinese history, literature, and religion as well as awareness of his Christian background. Very few scholars have the background to provide a balanced account of Legge's achievements, especially given our modern love of specialisation.
The second pragmatic problem is that there are major obstacles in gaining access to all the materials. Oxford's Bodleian does not own all of Legge's library, because much of it was bought by Mr. Wilberforce Eames in 1899 for the New York Public Library. This, however, does not solve the problem, for in 1909 the New York Public Library sold more than half of this collection to the Case Memorial Library of the Hartford Theological Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut. These materials remained in Hartford until the mid-1970s, when most of them were sold once more to Pitts Theology Library of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The total number of titles in this divided collection is nearly two thousand, including a large number of Chinese multi-volumed sets as well as a large number of sinological works and serials in many European languages. Many of these important sources still have Legge's notes in the margins, making them particularly valuable for revealing Legge's sources and his responses. Yet, for obvious reasons, there is no easy way to obtain access to these materials without travelling to all of these different locations. Furthermore, almost all of the earlier texts employed by Legge in the theological education of Chinese students in Hong Kong have apparently been destroyed by the humid climate.
The anti-missionary bias mentioned earlier has led to a third problem of some practical significance: Legge's lengthy professional career with the London Missionary Society has caused some scholars to suspect Legge's academic standards and competence in Chinese translation and in the evaluation of non-Christian traditions. A close look at his texts does show the strong Christian commitments underlying his work, but they are present in ways which do not substantially hinder a generally sensitive translation. Certainly Legge's philosophical commitments reflect the limitations of his age, but he was remarkably free of the conventions and biases which left far more disturbing marks in the work of some other scholars.
Finally, a basic dilemma involving all sinological work in the 1990s is still the inaccessibility of many basic texts. Gradually, since